<p>I get that students want to get the greatest education possible but it bothers me when someone applies to 15+ schools just so they can get into a "prestigious" university. How important is prestige? Shouldn't students go to schools that are a "good fit"? Whatever happened to that. I know I am kind of ranting but I just want some people's opinion on this. More prestige doesn't necessarily mean better education. I've seen studies showing that equally bright/talented students who attend an ivy/prestigious universitiy or a state school still end up just as successful. They usually graduate at the same time & most employers don't care if you're degree came from an ivy league school or not (there's always exceptions). I'm sure if the top colleges today weren't as prestigious as they are, they all of a sudden wouldn't be such a "fit" that some students claim them to be. I'm not trying to sound bitter, I'm a pretty good student myself. I just want to know what you guys think. I can't possibly be alone on this. Thanks for you guys' opinion</p>
<p>Prestige is honestly only important if you’re looking to work at BCG, Bain, McKinsey, Oliver Wyman, KKR, Blackrock, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs etc. after graduation. Other than that, you can really find quality education at most schools.</p>
<p>It may also matter for admission to PhD programs, but such prestige is specific to the major, and is defined differently from the usual notions of prestige (that investment banks and consulting companies and the like are concerned with). The usual notions of prestige are based on how good the worst students at the school are, while the PhD programs are more likely to be concerned with whether the top students in the undergraduate major at the school would be good PhD students.</p>
<p>use the SEARCH feature ‘prestige’ for many past discussion, even recent, on this</p>
<p>If they want to go to a school for prestige that is their prerogative. As long as they aren’t taking out massive loans they wouldn’t otherwise need to do so, I don’t have a problem with it.</p>
<p>But unless you have the money to spend visiting dozens of colleges, how can find one that fits? Honestly, US News rankings seems as good a system as anything else. Rankings shouldn’t be everything, but you can’t just ignore them.</p>
<p>Actually, you can. Plenty of students do, and still choose their colleges wisely (often based on more meaningful measurements such as outcomes after graduation and so on).</p>
<p>With the Internet and the numerous mailings that colleges now send, there is really no excuse for not being able to find one that fits. You don’t have to visit it to get a pretty good picture of what the college is all about. </p>
<p>Oh, and you get the nice feeling inside once you graduate that you endured the challenge and joined the long line of illustrious alumni who graduated from that prestigious institution.</p>
<p>Most students can adapt to a good number of colleges. It just so happens that when a school has a per person endowment of >$300,000, it can afford to spend a lot of money to accommodate a wide variety of interests. It also means that that it can afford to attract some of the best and brightest, keep its campus and facilities looking gorgeous, and hire some of the best professors (however the institution defines it) in the world. All of those factors contribute to why many highly accomplished students feel at home at many of the Ivy Leagues or similarly prestigious institutions.</p>
<p>As others have suggested, prestige is important and has a positive correlation with education quality, student body ability, and income after graduation. But school fit is more important than prestige. It is much better to do well at a regular university rather than poorly at a prestigious school. But you’ll need to do well at a top school to make it to a top company. </p>
<p>In fact, you can do your own linkedin search on where the current employees of McKinsey, Goldman, or BCG went to school. Harvard has three or four times the alumni working at such companies than the top state schools, and once you move down from the top state schools, they are virtually non-existent.</p>
<p>161 undergraduate institutions are represented in the class of 2015 at Harvard Law. Admission to law and med schools seems mostly to be about GPA and test scores.</p>
<p>Colleges with the highest rates of PhD production include small schools many people have never heard of. Yet in some fields a higher percentage of their alumni earn doctorates than alumni of the most famous, selective schools. </p>
<p>Try even to define “prestige”.
How would you measure it, other than by an opinion poll?</p>
<p>Prestige is a point of view. Only a handful (quite literally) of universities are universally prestigious, and by “universally”, I mean among the educated. Beyond those universities, prestige will vary wildly from demographic to demographic. Most universities that are defined as prestigious by the bulk of the CC demographic only have limited, and relatively spotted, prestige in the real world. Taking the sentiment of students among us only presents part of the picture, and no necessarily an accurate one. Most “elite universities” will be prestigious to some, not so prestigious to others. Does it really matter? I suppose it depends on the person and their sense of self-worth. Where it really counts (academe and the corporate world), prestige may matter a little initially, but there are dozens of universities and colleges that are considered “prestigious” in such circles, and that would include many liberal arts colleges, not-so-well-known private universities and large public universities. The key is to find a university that suits a student academically, socially and financially, and to make the most of the time on campus.</p>
<p>“In fact, you can do your own linkedin search on where the current employees of McKinsey, Goldman, or BCG went to school. Harvard has three or four times the alumni working at such companies than the top state schools, and once you move down from the top state schools, they are virtually non-existent.”</p>
<p>BuBBLES FoR SALE, I do not think it is very telling to look at Harvard, unless you maintain that Harvard is the only prestigious university. Harvard is usually disproportionately represented in such companies. The same cannot be said of any other university. Yale, for example, is not well presented at major Consulting firms. So unless we are restricting “prestige” to just Harvard, I am not sure this is a valid point. </p>
<p>Also, if you look closely at the Harvard alums at those companies, you will notice that a whopping 80% (or more) of them are alums of HBS, not of Harvard College, and I think from the context of this thread, the OP was referring to college, not graduate school. I do not think Harvard College would be much better represented than other top universities. I did a quick and dirty search of BCG employees in their website (I could not find the employee Bain and McKinsey), and Harvard had 5 employees with degrees from the college (compared to 32 from graduate programs, most of which from HBS). 5 is a lot mind you. No university had more than 5m and only few universities are as well represented by undergraduate alums, and as you can imagine most of them are considered good academically. The list of universities with 4-5 undergraduate alums represented, as far as I can see, includes Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, MIT, Michigan, Northwestern, Penn and UVa. According to the website, there was only 1 Chicago and Yale alums and only 2 Princeton and Stanford alums. </p>
<p>Given the relatively low numbers, I am fairly certain that the list is not complete.</p>
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<p>^one company may not be representative. Over 40% of Princeton grads go into finance/consulting - magnitudes greater than Harvard or Yale grads. Princeton is well represented in top firms like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, etc. These firms recruit heavily out of Princeton.</p>
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<p>And of course there is a big difference between correlation and causation. Dale & Krueger showed with two studies that students don’t get much from elite schools; the elite schools scoop up a lot of the best grads who are destined to do well wherever they attend college.</p>
<p>This is what they found:
</p>
<p>Their 2002 paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics:</p>
<p><a href=“http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/dalekrueger_More_Selective_College.pdf[/url]”>http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/dalekrueger_More_Selective_College.pdf</a></p>